We spotted a new Learning Objects White Paper posted in Macromedia’s Learning Object Development Center.

Written by New Media Consortium CEO Larry Johnson:

Elusive Vision: Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy,’ÄÝexplores the drivers, enablers and mediators in the’ÄÝlearning object economy.’ÄÝ Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium,’ÄÝdescribes and analyzes a’ÄÝsummit of international learning objects experts.’ÄÝ

I still need some time to digest the paper, [800k PDF ], includes the output of a group of LO heavyweights (Hodgins, Carey, Masie… where are Wiley and Downes? likely duking it out 😉 who gathered in San Francisco in September 2002.

And not to be outdone by a mere earth science teacher, our Humanities Blogger, Boris, has also latched onto the new RSS Feeds from About.com (see boris blog…) and quickly drills down to some useful Art History ideas for “approaching art”

This is pushing beyond the bounds of mere learning objects, but again gets out the nortion of using RSS to network together useful (to Prof Boris) sorts of content he can peruse and pontificate upon.

Actually, we have some ventures going on Electronic Portfolios at Maricopa.

A new mcli site (for now) chronicles three project/efforts.

Now, I wish our work with electornic portfolios was buzzing enough for someone in the organization to force me to attend ePorfolio 2003, the “first international conference on the digital portfolio, 9-10 Octobre 2003, Poitiers France”

Can you say “buzzword”? This year’s “portal”??

ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in technology innovation on campus

For our new CDB readers, we have been experimenting a few months with adding Trackback records to all items in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). This allows a way for each item to potentially record an entry everyitm someone describes an MLX item in a weblog. And we also have included a TrackBack summary tool for our entire collection.

But still we new, and were reminded by David Carter-Tod (and also noted by Randy at CarvingCode) that there is still not much of a pool of people who can easily send those TrackBack messages or pings (Limited now to MovableType users although Dave says it is coming soon to Manila and Radio) .

So, as one first crude cut, we have a new feature of every MLX item that provides a web form for registering a new ping. It is still not nearly as elegant as a tool that can autodetect the Trackback record and automatically send a ping.

In fact since SiT’s Manila site lacks a TrackBack function, I used a new feature in the MLX to post a TrackBack ping to the item he blogged about as if David had done it himself.

But here it goes, along with a recap of the TrackBack features we have added to the MLX.

For those that have beeing following (or not) the Learning Object experiment’s here (see Back to TrackBack), we have applied the MovableType Trackback concept to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange.

With some time to tinker today, I cooked up a new trackback summary tool that allows one to check out the trackbacks across our site. It is ugly, ugly code, a very un-elegant hack, but it is a concept that can illustrate (maybe) what the potnetial is for TrackBack and Learning Objects.

So what?